1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to identity federation configuration across computer systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Identity federation is used for managing the identity and as well as resource-access authorization across computing systems. A typical example of access to cross-computing system resources is the application of cloud services. With the popularity of cloud services, more and more customers, such as enterprises, leverage cloud services to satisfy their business needs. Identity federation enables users to seamlessly access cross-domain applications, which provides a way for enterprises to access a variety of applications of cloud services using internal accounts of the enterprises. The work of configuring the identity federation at both sides of the enterprise and the cloud service is done by system administrator from the enterprise itself (or so-called “client administrator”). As providers of cloud services usually provide their cloud services in proprietary environments using proprietary data formats even in proprietary protocols, in other words, the enterprise and the cloud service provider may adopt different identity federation standards, and the style of user interface and the data format at the enterprise side may completely different from the cloud service side. Thus, the system administrator has to be familiar with not only the identity federation configuration standards and the user interface at the enterprise side, but also the identity federation configuration standards and the user interface at the cloud service side. Moreover, there are often a lot of repetitive data existing in the identity federation configuration of both sides, leading to unnecessary workload for the system administrator.